KINGSTON, R.I. — October 11, 2018 — University of Rhode Island graduates Daniel Williams, of North Smithfield, James Kiessling, of East Providence, Christian D’Ovidio of Cranston won the Award of Excellence in the Global Grand Final Competition at the 2018 Innovate FPGA (field-programmable gate array) Global Design Contest. The team also won the contest’s Silver Award in Americas regional award.

The Innovate FPGA Global Design Contest is an international competition involving teams from around the world. They compete on projects to enhance embedded computers with the firms, Terasic and Intel. The competition is open to students, professors, inventors and industry professionals. The team was the only group of undergraduate students from an American university to advance to the Grand Final competition in California.

“We are extremely proud and excited for their achievement,” said advisors Bin Li, assistant professor of electrical, computer and biomedical engineering, and Professor Jien-Chung Lo, of electrical, computer and biomedical engineering. “The students worked hard and their effort paid off. The project requires knowledge from core courses in computer engineering. Their achievement proves that our students are receiving a first-rate education.”

The team’s quantum gate emulator was designed to be used as a learning tool for individuals who want to learn how to use quantum computing.

“Quantum computing is a fast-growing area of interest in the computing world, as they are expected to be able to solve problems much faster than classical computers,” said Li. “However, very few people have intimate knowledge of quantum computing, and the learning curve of understanding quantum computing is very high. Thus, there is a strong need to develop a quantum computing emulator.”

In this project, Lo suggested that the students use FPGA to mimic various quantum gates. Li came up with the idea to make the emulator accessible by users via their laptops and smartphones anytime, anywhere. The students used these ideas to design and build the emulator throughout the spring 2018 semester in their embedded system design course taught by Li.

After submitting the project at the end of the semester, their proposal went through two stages of regional competitions, where they were awarded the Silver Award in Americas, and won $1,200 and an all-expense paid trip to the Grand Final Competition in California. For winning the Award of Excellence at the Grand Finals, they won a Terasic Self-Balancing Robot.

“I found that the project was challenging, and it forced me to learn a lot more about FPGAs than I had learned in my courses,” said Kiessling. “The contest itself was also a great experience, being able to go to California, visit the Intel campus, and see all of the other great projects that others made at the Grand Finals.”

Emma Gauthier, a student writer in the URI Marketing and Communications Department and a journalism major, wrote this press release.